Rhonda Garelick
By Alexander C. Kafka
Be sure to come to the University of Nebraska if you want to see the Huskers facing off against some powerhouse Division 1-A pigskin foe in Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium. Be sure to get to Lincoln, too, for the latest in avant-garde dance and lectures by body-modifying French performance artists.
Say what?
When Rhonda Garelick came to Nebraska in 2008 from academic stints in New York, Connecticut, Paris, and Colorado, she had “never been to a big state football school like this,” she says. “I love many things about it,” but she missed some of the East Coast culture-vulture opportunities too, and figured, “I bet if I brought here the things I loved, other people would love them too.”
While some homesick Easterners might have left that as a thought experiment, Garelick, who has a joint appointment in Nebraska’s English department and its Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, started the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium.
Last year, from $60,000 in seed money from the Hixson-Lied Endowment, she programmed a series of programs and lectures on the theme “Race, American History, and Performance.” It included a performance by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis; a free public lecture and a week’s teaching by Robert O’Meally, founder and former director of Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies; a free solo tap performance, MONK, by the MIT theater-arts and dance professor Thomas F. DeFrantz; and appearances by the playwright Nilaja Sun, the dance critic Marcia Siegel, and David Dorfman Dance.
This year, Garelick has raised $130,000 for the IAS and programmed a busy schedule, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, around the theme “Technology, Prosthetics, and the Body in Performance.”
Tomorrow (Oct. 29), for instance, Heidi Latsky Dance’s GIMP company, which features dancers with prosthetic limbs, muscular dystrophy, and other challenges, will perform at the Lied Center following a public symposium today (Oct. 28) with Latsky and the New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella.
Last month an audience of 920 saw a performance by Time Lapse Dance, which melds experimental movement, circus acts, and fabric-and-light spectacles. And on November 2, the French performance and visual artist Orlan, whose work has included surgically modifying her own head, will discuss her exhibit at the university’s Sheldon Museum of Art, where Garelick’s husband, J. Daniel Veneciano, is director.
Most of the artists Garelick invites “are people I know through my own many years working and studying” on the East Coast, she says. She’s followed Latsky’s work since seeing her dance with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “I saw her performance with GIMP and read about its success and just knew it was perfect” in its combining of social consciousness and revolutionary art, Garelick says. “She’s reconceiving dance.”
In case bringing performances, exhibits, and lectures to Lincoln weren’t enough of a challenge, Garelick is also working with the University of Nebraska Press on a book series affiliated with the IAS. The first volume, which Garelick and Veneciano co-edited, is on Orlan. A second book will be tied to this year’s theme of technology, prosthetics, and the body in performance, and will include sections on teaching art online; drama and the Internet; the erotics of Internet pornography; and the fertility industry. A third volume in the series will be a republication of a Garelick-edited Southwest Review double issue devoted to performance.
Garelick teaches a seminar related to IAS programming, this year exploring theory and literature—Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Donna Harroway, Frankenstein, Krapp’s Last Tape—related to the body-transformation and performance themes.
As a girl in Brooklyn and into her years at Yale, where she earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in French and comparative literature, Garelick took ballet, modern, jazz, African, hip-hop, and tap dance classes. “I’m kind of a wannabe,” she says. A scholar and critic who has written for major newspapers, Garelick has also published scholarly work on performance, literature, fashion, and cultural politics. Her books include Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 1998), and Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2007), about the modern dancer and lighting designer. Garelick is currently at work on a cultural biography for Random House about how Coco Chanel’s fashion revolution related to the politics of interwar Europe. (Yes, there have been movies and TV series about Chanel lately, Garelick says, but “none of them has gotten to why I think she is important.”)
Garelick founded the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium, she says, because she had “grown frustrated over time with the chasm between scholarly work and the public experience of the arts and literature.” Moreover, in Lincoln, despite having a world-class performing arts center, she “didn’t get the feeling that the general public was at all integrated into what was going on in performance at the university.”
Plus, she says, “performance is often sort of a throw-away experience.” So she wanted to put together programming of “socially conscious themes beyond a single performance” that would integrate intellect and aesthetic experience.
But don’t worry. As successful as IAS has become, we hear Lincoln still has a little football going on too.
Read more about the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
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19 Responses to U. of Nebraska Brings Cutting-Edge Arts to the Heartland
cmsmw - October 29, 2010 at 6:50 am
“Be sure to come to the University of Nebraska if you want to see the Huskers facing off against some powerhouse Division 1-A pigskin foe in Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium. Be sure to get to Lincoln, too, for the latest in avant-garde dance and lectures by body-modifying French performance artists.
“Say what?”
*****
*Rolls eyes* I know that you need a catchy lead for an article like this, but isn’t the juxtaposition of disparate activities and fields of study one of the points of a university?
Back when I was a young graduate student at the large state-supported football powerhouse where I now teach I read in the local newspaper a letter to the editor extolling the wonderfulness of a local performing-arts event the previous weekend and lambasting those of us who spent Saturday afternoon in the stands of the football stadium. What the letter writer seemed not to notice was the fact that the football game was on Saturday and the concert was on Sunday and a lot of us could very well have been at both, as I was.
cmsmw - October 29, 2010 at 6:57 am
Clarification: Actually, the letter-writer seemed aware of the fact that the events were on different days, but she seemed to assume that no one who was at the football game would also have been at the concert.
ahausmann0745 - October 29, 2010 at 9:31 am
It didn’t take a newcomer to make Lincoln an interesting place for arts and humanities – it already was long before Garelick arrived. Rather condescending, I’d say.
lincster27 - October 29, 2010 at 10:00 am
ahausmann0745 - October 29, 2010 at 9:31 am
It didn’t take a newcomer to make Lincoln an interesting place for arts and humanities – it already was long before Garelick arrived. Rather condescending, I’d say.
*****
Very true. I found during my eight years in Nebraska was that “lonely easterners” equate the area between the Mississippi River, north of Texas, and east of California as a cultural wasteland. This is true if you’re looking for “eastern” culture, which is not to say that cities like Lincoln and Omaha aren’t steeped in their own arts and humanities, without all the stuffy pretentiousness of our eastern cousins. Highbrow doesn’t really play well out here.
lewandowski - March 30, 2011 at 5:33 pm
So I guess the author suggest we should hang out in the bathroom more often. LOL
rch1952 - March 30, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Cleanliness being next to godliness, and godliness (or the profession of it at least) being a hallmark of some types of conservatives, perhaps the researchers should adjust the survey for atheist/agnostic conservatives (which, BTW, do exist).
edwardcj - March 30, 2011 at 9:31 pm
This is the worst case of crap (pun intended) I have seen in the Chronicle recently. The idea that cleanliness makes people more likely to adopt socially conservative values is as much bunk as the notion not mentioned here – that the socially conservative are more likely to be clean and fastidious.
richardtaborgreene - March 31, 2011 at 5:39 am
This, we all need to modestly remember, is “an effect”.
The vast majority of Psychology Review articles are made trivial by “an effect” published WITHOUT magnitudes, and boundary conditions. The physical sciences, not by policy but by historic norms, require a trio be published (in general, yes there are exceptions); an effect, a magnitude estimate of it, and boundary conditions necessary for it to appear and disappear.
Yes we have an effect, but there are BILLIONS of them already published and each is contradicted by at least 2000 other published effects so knowing one does one PRACTICAL good in none but the very rarest of circumstances. Thinking about George Washington, for example, in the 1950s was found to increase eating of broccoli—-
or wow, another idea, an insight—perhaps the people who think, of these effects and the people who publish them have brains wired so that tax policy neurons are tightly linked to hand cleanliness neurons.
realclearscience - March 31, 2011 at 6:07 am
Research indicates that people who wash their hands feel less guilty:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/201103/sin-is-absolution-just-hand-wash-away
Feeling “conservative” because of cleanliness is not a stretch.
feudipandola - March 31, 2011 at 8:43 am
I cleaned restrooms a few years as a struggling young 30 something. I can tell you for a fact that the dirtiest restrooms were of the female persuasion. I realize that is not a pc comment, but I know what I saw and what I cleaned. Don’t know what their politics were, but they were filthier than the men’s rooms.
tappat - March 31, 2011 at 8:50 am
Perhaps the college students associate hand sanitizers with governmental impositions. What we typically call “conservative” these days is usually associated with those who think and feel that governmental impositions are liberal and so terrible, perhaps disgusting. The point is that these are all associations, and associations are at once perfectly comprehensible as well as dynamic and highly specific, even if they do not follow any expectations, such as those which we used to call natural laws.
music_librarian - March 31, 2011 at 9:13 am
I don’t buy it. I’m as liberal as they come, and I’m also a germophobe.
_perplexed_ - March 31, 2011 at 2:24 pm
From the Psychological Science article: “… participants who reported their political attitudes in the presence of the hand-sanitizer dispenser reported a less liberal political orientation (M = 4.30) than did participants in the control condition (M = 4.93), t(50) = 2.31, p <.05, d = 0.89."
So contrary to your claim, the size of the effect (d=.89) is reported. There may be good reason to question the importance of the finding, but it usually helps to actually consider the article.
idshore - March 31, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Good points. And also don’t forget that those in the social sciences typically suffer from “physics envy.”
richardtaborgreene - April 1, 2011 at 10:14 am
I said “the vast majority” not all—geez. Anyway the important point is “an effect” “a relation” “a correlation” is such a tiny tiny step towards knowledge that one can use, that the rate of increase of such “effects” however exponential does not keep up with the faster growing exponential of new challenges and environment entities interacting. We are generating a tiny size of “knowledge” that does not reduce the overall knowledge gap we need in order to survive.
THis particular efftect is funny. Amusing, Enjoyable evidencing its own useless usefulness. Think of its practical implications—-subersives tricking electorates into hand cleaning just before elections. Invisible hand sprays at polling stations. Chemically treated ballots that clean while being filled in. The opportunities for a good sneak are legion and wonderful. Guided by these lovely PUBLISHED tidbits of knowledge the emply-headed head towards omniscience!!!! one pitifully too small step at a time.
_perplexed_ - April 1, 2011 at 11:30 am
with this, I fully agree…
Winghunter - April 3, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Understanding what drives psychotics makes one feel like washing their hands;
The Liberal Mind: Psychological Causes of Political Madness by Dr. Lyle Rossiter http://bit.ly/a4RTOS
busyslinky - April 3, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Another implication: a perfect pickup line if you want a person to have sex with you would be….
“You stink, and I haven’t taken a shower in eight days”
Marketers of Experts - June 15, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Here is a great lecture on advanced notions on disgust.
The Importance of Attending to
Phylogenetic Derivation in the Study of the Mind Or Why Emotions are
Kludgy Or Some Gross Conclusions from the Study of Grossness
Daniel M.T. Fessler, UCLA Department of Anthropology
The
evolutionary study of mind and behavior has benefited enormously from
the functionality heuristic, i.e., the assumption that mental mechanisms
can usefully be understood as well-designed solutions to recurrent
adaptive problems. While virtually every investigator in this area
acknowledges the importance of Tinbergen’s (1963) Four Levels of
Explanation, in practice, emphasis in evolutionary psychology is
invariably placed primarily on ultimate explanations. Although this is a
productive starting point, because evolution involves the gradual
modification of existing designs, the functionality heuristic will
frequently lead investigators to under-emphasize, or even overlook
entirely, constraints on optimality entailed by phylogeny. Likewise,
even when high levels of functionality are, in fact, observed, the
functionality heuristic will often fail to explain many features of the
adaptation at issue, features that diminish efficiency even if they do
not influence effectiveness. The study of emotions provides an
opportunity to illustrate the utility of combining ultimate and
phylogenetic perspectives in investigating the mind. A hybrid approach
to emotions can illuminate otherwise puzzling combinations of qualia,
display, cognition, and behavior, and suggests areas where we might
expect constraints on optimality. Additionally, such an approach can
productively generate predictions concerning the nature of emotions
across species and across taxa, holding the promise of a broadly
comparative evolutionary affective science that pinpoints both the
commonalities and the divergences between our emotions and those of
other organisms. These possibilities will be illustrated through a
discussion of research on the evolutionary psychology of disgust.”
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/presentation.php?id=235